Buckle up: How Super Pumped brought the 'quintessential American story' of The Battle for Uber to TV

It's hard not to talk about Uber in grandiose terms. Since its founding a little more than a decade ago, the rideshare company has upended multiple industries, set a template for numerous companies that followed, and fully ingrained itself into many people's daily lives. Like Google, Amazon, and other tech giants, Uber often seems less like a company and more like an institution, a fact of life — to the point that, also like Google, it's become a verb.

Accordingly, it's hard not to talk about the story of Uber in grandiose terms. At least, that's the impression you get from the people who brought it to the screen with Showtime's Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, a seven-episode retelling of the company's turbulent rise.

"Early on, we got fascinated with the idea that this was a story about the rebels becoming fascists," says David Levien, who co-created the show with his longtime creative partner Brian Koppelman. "There was a corrupt, entrenched power in the taxi lobbies, and the companies around that, that disenfranchised the drivers and profited [off of them]. And then this other company came in with this idea and unseated it, with all the best intentions to do better, but in the end, once they got the power, they in many ways became worse."

"It's Hannah Arendt's lost treasure," adds Koppelman (an allusion to the political theorist's 1963 book On Revolution). "And it's always worth telling a story about how the treasure gets lost in the revolution."

Super Pumped is based on journalist Mike Isaac's 2019 book chronicling the ruthless tactics Uber employed to spur its rapid growth, such as charging a bogus "Safe Rides Fee" (the surcharge was "devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip," Isaac wrote) and using a tech tool called Greyball to dodge law enforcement. The book also digs into Uber's toxic culture, from bacchanalian company parties to allegedly rampant sexual harassment, which Isaac argues flowed from the top: hard-charging then-CEO Travis Kalanick, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt in the series.

"Travis just leaned as hard as he could into that beastly, animalistic drive to win, conquer, and kill," the actor tells EW. "By the end of this series, he's surrounded by people that won't say no to him, because he's systematically picking off the people who will, and demonizing anybody that does push back. By the end, he's a mad dog."

It's the stuff of high drama, certainly, and after receiving the Super Pumped manuscript from Isaac, Levien and Koppelman, who also co-created Showtime's Billions, were instantly hooked.

"When the details started hitting, I saw immediately that it was a great show," Levien says. "You're outside of a business story and into an ancient Greek kind of a thing, where these guys see themselves as titans and want to grab everything for themselves and can't have any rivals."

Adds Koppelman, "When we read in the book, for instance, about the Safe Rides Fee, it made us immediately understand the kind of gumption this person had, and that his organization had. And then it's a question of, how do we set these things up in a way that they will tell a story that adds up into saying something about Uber and about Silicon Valley, but more than that, about both the benefits and the costs of American industry?"

After penning a pilot script, the duo brought their Billions colleague Beth Schacter aboard to serve as a co-showrunner with them; she, too, was enraptured by the story. "The book has this momentum to it, where it starts off and you kind of can't believe it," Schacter says. "And then the 'I can't believe it' moments just keep accreting, to the point where, by the end of the show, Travis's behavior is so wild — and yet so understandable, because you now understand the inside of this man's head, that you just want to go for the ride."

To take viewers on that ride, the creators turned to Gordon-Levitt, who they believed could embody every side of Kalanick that the series would require.

"We needed an actor who was very believably intelligent, and very credibly able to enlist people in his vision of the future, and also somebody who was willing to not try to make themself look good at every turn," Koppelman explains. "And Joe was in our head the whole time. The day that David and I finished [writing] the pilot, we sent the script to Joe's agent."

For his part, Gordon-Levitt says, "I find the Uber story fascinating. I think if there's one ill you can point to in the world, it's that profits trump everything, and companies are expected to just make money and make value for shareholders at any cost. And Travis was one of the best in the world at that."

Still, he adds, "I think if you just reduce someone to, 'They're a bad guy' or 'They're a good guy,' it gets simplistic and boring. So finding the human complexity in both his strengths and his shortcomings was really important. What you read about in the book is mostly the questionable decisions and behavior, and we don't shy away from portraying those things. But what you might not get a sense of by reading interviews or reading the book is what it felt like to have a conversation with Travis, and to be friends and collaborators with him, and [how] people really loved him. That complexity is a big part of what makes a character fun to play."

The other key figure in the story of Uber is Bill Gurley, the venture capitalist who helped fund the company and mentored Kalanick, and who later led a coup to force the CEO to resign. As played by Kyle Chandler, Gurley embodies "a sort of moral authority that [Chandler] can project on screen," Koppelman says, but also a steely pragmatism that plays counterpoint to Kalanick's hyperbolic energy.

"It would be really easy to play the role as just the moral compass, but this is also someone who's a brilliant, brilliant investor," explains Schacter. "And Kyle brings in a brilliant calculation behind the eyes. He can see the big picture, he can see the win."

Adds Chandler, "[Gurley] has a moral compass that seemed to me to be pretty solid, and then all of a sudden, he's dealing with someone who is diametrically opposed in a lot of ways to what he believes in and stands for. But to get what he wants, he has to appease some of that [in Travis]. It's kind of a moral drama for the Bill character."

To play Gurley's standoffs with Kalanick, the Friday Night Lights star continues, he and Gordon-Levitt essentially felt their way through it, forgoing much rehearsal or discussion in favor of something more instinctual.

"Each scene, you didn't know where the other guy was going to go," Chandler explains. "You didn't know how he worked his material, and that made it a little more exciting. It's like three-dimensional chess."

And it's that humanity that the creators hope will turn this "quintessential American story," as Chandler calls it, from merely a wild ride to a truly absorbing drama.

"The secret weapon here was that all of the [writers'] room identified with somebody in this story at some point, and could bring in personal and very real emotions," Schacter says. "And so there's this undercurrent of real vulnerability that runs underneath this totemic story, which is the sweet spot for television — these juggernauts with real people underneath it."

Or, as Levien puts it: "All business is personal, in the end." Buckle up.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Showtime.

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